BANTAY
GOBYERNO
Ike
Señeres
It may just be a play
of words, but any violation of any law is a crime, no matter what the law is,
and no matter what kind of violation it was. For some reasons that I do not
understand however, the Philippine National Police (PNP) seems to be focusing
its attention only to crimes against persons and crimes against property. As a
matter of fact, it came to my attention that the PNP only reports the so-called
“index crimes” as the source of data for the so-called “crime rate”. As defined
by the PNP, crimes against persons include murder, homicide, physical injury
and rape, and crimes against property include robbery, theft, car napping and
cattle rustling.
As far as I know,
illegal drugs and illegal gambling are not included in the so-called “index
crimes” and that may be so because these two would not fall under the category
of either crimes against persons or crimes against property.
Could that be the reason
why these two crimes were practically ignored by the PNP until President
Rodrigo Roa Duterte came along?
I hope not, but I have
heard arguments from some police officials that illegal drugs and illegal
gambling are not really that important, because “no one gets hurt”. Is that
perhaps the reason why former President Benigno Aquino said that illegal
gambling is not his priority?
Since I am not a
lawyer, I have the liberty to interpret the law any way I want to, even at the
risk of sounding too naive. Having said that, I will now say that in the case
of environmental laws, it is not true that “no one gets hurt”, because the
environment gets “hurt” and when that happens, people get “hurt” too by
environmental damage.
I will also say that
environmental crimes are crimes against property, even if the proprietary
rights would belong to the country in general and not to people in particular.
On a higher scale, national patrimony is national property, even if no one
holds title to it. Having said that, could we now include environmental crimes
as “index crimes”?
At the very least, we
could say that environmental crimes would include the pollution of land, air
and water. While that may be correct to say, there could be extreme violations
in the case of land, such as the extraction of black sands from the rivers and
believe it or not, the excavation of entire mountains for the purpose of
exporting the soil in unprocessed form.
Perhaps exporting may
not even be an appropriate term, because I have heard of a mountain in
Luzon that was leveled and after which, the soil was used to build the
Chinese bases in the West Philippine Sea, within our own territory, using our
own soil! If that is not a crime against persons, perhaps that could be a crime
of treason?
At the very least, I
could say that we are in a bit of a quandary, because we have the PNP that does
not seem to have the resources to implement water pollution laws, and we have a
Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) that does not seem to have the
police powers to implement these laws.
Well, we do have a
Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) that could help enforce water pollution laws, but
perhaps their officers and staff have to be made aware that they are now a
civilian organization that could enforce civilian laws without being bothered
about militarization issues. Every now and then, the Philippine Navy (PN) helps
in cleaning the bays and that is good for publicity purposes, but for that
matter, the PCG could do that daily.
I think that the
problem with our environmental laws is that there are too many agencies that
are supposed to implement these laws so much so that a lot of finger pointing
happens when these are not implemented. Take smoke belching for example. The
Clean Air Act was passed many years ago, but our air is still polluted. Who is
really accountable for that?
Should it be the
Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) only, or could we also
blame the Land Transportation Office (LTO) and the Land Transportation
Regulatory Board (LTFRB)? How about the Department of Energy (DOE) and the
Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA)? Should they not be put to task also?
Perhaps it would be a
good idea to apply the “supply chain approach” in the implementation of our
laws. Using that approach, each government agency in the supply chain could be
put to task, and that way, these agencies could no longer point their fingers
at the other agencies.
Although the DOE may
not be directly involved in the implementation of air pollution laws, they control
the standards of fuels that contribute to the pollution. Down the line, the LTO
should no longer register vehicles that are belching smoke and if any operator
would get around the LTO, the LTFRB should no longer give them a franchise to
operate.
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